Scrivener.net

Monday, July 26, 2004

Is the NY Times biased? Of course not! Oh, wait... of course it is!, it says.

Howell Raines, then Executive Editor of the New York Times, accepting an "editor of the year" award from the National Press Foundation, February 20, 2003:

"Our greatest accomplishment as a profession is the development since World War II of a news reporting craft that is truly non-partisan ... It is an exercise in disinformation, of alarming proportions, this attempt to convince the audience of the world's most ideology-free newspapers that they're being subjected to agenda-driven news reflecting a liberal bias."

Dan Okrent, public editor of the New York Times, July 25, 2004:

"Is the New York Times a liberal newspaper? Of course it is.... the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others... if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

"... if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

"Start with the editorial page, so thoroughly saturated in liberal theology that when it occasionally strays from that point of view the shocked yelps from the left overwhelm even the ceaseless rumble of disapproval from the right...."

Hey, that was Howell's page before he took over the rest of the paper!

Howell? Howell? Did Howell lie?? I'll never believe a Times editorial again.

From now on it's the NY Post for me -- a paper that at least has the virtue of not getting self-righteous about kidding itself. Which goes with a livelier sports section as well.